We Need an Honest Inner-Party Agreement

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Among the bureaucrats of the CPSU, as our correspondents have informed us more than once lately, there is now widespread a type who concedes all positions except the question of the party regime. While rejecting Stalinism in private conversation, these people still continue to defend Stalin — but how? With hatred and gnashing of teeth. Here are two verbatim quotations from recent letters:

"They all speak of Stalin's isolation and the general hatred for him … and at the same time they often add: if it wasn't for that (we omit a colorful term), everything would fall apart; it's only he who holds everything together."

And again:

"Basically, they say, Trotsky is right in almost everything (they now adduce as an example of correctness the proposal to make 1933 a year outside the five-year plans) — but he makes one mistake: he sees in front of him the proletariat of 1917-23. But this proletariat no longer exists. The majority of the present-day workers left the countryside only yesterday. You can't give them democracy. They have to be kept firmly in check."

These two quotations, which coincide with others of the same type, characterize very clearly the situation in the country and especially inside the Stalinist faction itself. Especially instructive is the date indicated for the end of normal party life: 1923, the time of Lenin's final withdrawal from work, the beginning of the struggle against the Opposition — the opening of the period of pure bureaucratism and the rule of the epigones. The Left Opposition, on the admission of the liberal bureaucrats — and it must be said that the overwhelming majority of the Stalinists have fallen into "rotten liberalism" — is correct on all basic questions except one: it has confidence in a party in which you cannot have confidence. Ten years of "proletarianization" and "Bolshevization" of the party of Lenin have brought about a situation where the apparatchiki say with complete sincerity and conviction that the composition of the party is so crude, unreliable, non-party, and even anti-party that party democracy cannot even be thought of. This is the main result of the decade. We emphasize: Stalinism has liquidated the party.

But, say the liberal bureaucrats with forced candor, you have to face facts. It's precisely because the party has been stifled that everything rests on the apparatus. And the apparatus is kept from decay by Stalin. If that linchpin breaks, everything will fall to pieces. Such is decadent Bonapartist philosophy: Stalin's policy is false, he himself has become hated, but he holds the "regime” together and therefore we, the enlightened bureaucrats, will continue to be the tools of a false policy.

What is this "regime" maintained by Stalin? The same one as stifled the party and undermined the proletarian dictatorship. That the Stalinist regime is maintained by Stalin is indisputable. But even if we admit that Stalin is capable of maintaining his own regime for a long time yet — and we consider this out of the question — it is not at all possible to admit that Stalin's regime can give anything to communism but defeats and humiliations.

The terrible confusion in the Soviet economy, the dreadful gulf between town and country, the deep cleft between the proletariat and the state it created, the catastrophic defeats on the international arena, culminating in the vast historical disaster of Germany — these are the results of the policy of Stalinism. The centrist bureaucracy does not deny this account, since it admits the political correctness of the Opposition. But it adds: nevertheless, we must keep behind Stalin, since neither the proletariat nor the party deserves any confidence.

Both our friends and our enemies know that we are not inclined to embellish the existing situation, especially now, after the coup in Germany. But in contrast to the liberal officials, we do not consider the situation hopeless. Sorry sophisms about how despite the perniciousness of Stalinism it is necessary to support Stalin's autocracy are dictated not by the highest wisdom of state but by petty fear of changes and shifts which might unexpectedly shake … the liberal bureaucracy itself.

It is perfectly true that Stalin has destroyed the party, smashed it in pieces, scattered it in prison and exile, diluted it with a crude mass, frightened it, demoralized it. It is perfectly true that the party as such no longer exists. But at the same time, it remains a very real historical factor. This is proved by the continuing arrests of Left Oppositionists; by the Stalin clique's fear of Rakovsky, whom it has driven off to the far north; by the return to the road of opposition of Old Bolsheviks who had tried to cooperate with Stalin (the arrests and exiles of Zinoviev, Kamenev, I. N. Smirnov, Preobrazhensky, Mrachkovsky, Perevertsev, and many others). Finally, the admission by the bureaucrats themselves that the Opposition is basically correct in everything is in itself an extremely clear symptom of the fact that the party exists, forms its own opinion, and in part even forces it on the apparatus.

When we speak of a revival of party democracy, we mean precisely the need to gather together the scattered, fettered, frightened elements of the real Bolshevik Party, revive its normal work, give it back the decisive influence on the life of the country. To solve the problem of awakening and gathering together otherwise than by the methods of party democracy is unthinkable. It is not the Stalin clique who will carry out this work, nor the liberal bureaucracy which supports Stalin, whom it hates out of fear of the masses (how typical, by the way, of liberal bureaucracies in general!). The party can only be revived by the party itself.

The platform of the Left Opposition, of course, does not talk of some self-sufficient, absolute democracy, standing above social and political realities. We need democracy for proletarian dictatorship and within the framework of that dictatorship. We do not shut our eyes to the fact that an approach to the revival of the party, only thinkable by the method of party democracy, will inevitably mean for a transitional period that freedom of criticism is allowed to the whole of the present motley and contradictory official party, and to the Komsomol [Young Communist League]. The Bolshevik elements in the party will not be able to find each other, link up, reach agreements, and come out actively unless they differentiate themselves from the Thermidorean elements and from the passive mass; and this differentiation is unthinkable in turn without open criticism, without a platform, without discussions, without factional groups, Le., without all the internalized sicknesses of the present official party being brought out to the surface.

The transitional period will without a doubt be the most critical and dangerous. But if we are not mistaken, Machiavelli already said that you cannot avoid mortal danger by avoiding all danger. Stalin's regime leads to destruction, nowhere else. The revival of the party by democratizing it involves undoubted risk, but it still opens the only thinkable way out.

Already in the process of revival the party is measuring the force of resistance of the Thermidorean tendencies. The spread of democracy to the trade unions and the Soviets, which in itself is absolutely necessary, will take place in forms determined by the political environment, and under the constant leadership of the party. Soviet democracy is elastic. If there are real internal and international successes, the framework of democracy will expand rapidly. The limits of expansion in any given period can only be shown by experience. Political evaluation of experience and correct application of it can only be carried out by a party living a healthy life. There is no reason for it to have two million people in it It may become two, three, or four times smaller, but it must be a party.

The liquidation of the Stalin regime, which is historically absolutely inevitable and what is more not far off, may however take place in different ways. The internal logic of the centrist apparatus, including the liberal bureaucracy, will without fail lead to the downfall of the regime as a whole. The general line is preparing a general catastrophe. If things were allowed to take their own course, the liquidation of Stalin's autocracy would be the penultimate episode in the liquidation of all the conquests of October. But overthrowing the Soviet regime is fortunately not so simple. Deep down in, there are great creative forces. Their conscious, fully thought-out and confirmed expression is the Left Opposition (the Bolshevik-Leninists). In the process of struggle with the Thermidorean groupings, in the process of purging the party of the raw material, the ballast, the relations between the faction of the Bolshevik-Leninists and the centrist faction, to the extent that it wishes to and is prepared to fight against Thermidor, may take different forms. What form they take is not at all irrelevant for the fate of the revolution. It may be said that the degree of risk in passing over to the path of democracy depends in great measure on how precisely in the immediate future the relations between the Stalinists and semi-Stalinists on the one hand and the Left Opposition on the other take shape. As far as we are concerned, we are prepared today just as we were ten years ago to do everything to give the inner-party development as calm and peaceful a character as possible and prevent it from growing into a civil war.

Of course we cannot refuse to criticize centrism in the way centrism has refused to criticize the Social Democracy. Such a refusal would mean, we think, nothing but the renunciation of the goal (saving the dictatorship) in the name of the means (agreement with the Stalinists). But mutual criticism, in itself unavoidable and fruitful, may have a different character, depending on the extent to which it is consciously prepared by both sides and in what organizational framework it takes place. In this field, the importance of which does not require proof, the Left Opposition is prepared at any moment to come to an agreement in which it will ask for itself only the restoration of its right to fight in the common ranks.

The struggle for a particular party policy has nothing in common with the struggle for the seizure of the apparatus with the aim of destroying and expelling the faction which was ruling yesterday. This is not our policy. On the contrary, we wish the party to put an end to it It is a matter of something immeasurably higher than the claims of cliques or individuals. We need a loyal party regime. The easiest, truest, and most painless way to reach it would be through an inner-party agreement. In view of the immeasurable dangers crowding in on the Soviet republic, the Bolshevik-Leninists again propose to all the groupings of the ruling faction an honorable agreement before the eyes of the party and of the international proletariat